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RickSchoen10-Marble
10-Marble
December 14, 2022
Question

Some Unicode Characters Don't Display in PDF

  • December 14, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 1327 views

We use an in-house authored, very simply styled FOSI to generate PDFs from our XML files (using a slightly modified version of NLM's JATS 1.3 with Oasis tables and MathML). One problem we continue to have is that some Unicode characters, especially those for non-Latin scripts are not displaying in the generated PDFs. These characters display correctly in Arbortext Editor (we are using version 8.1.3.1). When generating the PDFs we will see warning messages like this:

Attempt to use non-existent character 'ব' (2476,0x09ac) in font "Cambria"
- looking for slant=regular, weight=regular (400)
- no substitute character exists in font "Lucida Sans Unicode"

Attempt to use non-existent character 'ন' (2472,0x09a8) in font "Cambria"
- looking for slant=regular, weight=regular (400)
- no substitute character exists in font "Lucida Sans Unicode"

Attempt to use non-existent character 'ব' (2476,0x09ac) in font "Cambria"
- looking for slant=regular, weight=regular (400)
- no substitute character exists in font "Lucida Sans Unicode"

Attempt to use non-existent character 'ি' (2495,0x09bf) in font "Cambria"
- looking for slant=regular, weight=regular (400)
- no substitute character exists in font "Lucida Sans Unicode"

Attempt to use non-existent character 'ব' (2476,0x09ac) in font "Cambria"
- looking for slant=regular, weight=regular (400)
- no substitute character exists in font "Lucida Sans Unicode"

Attempt to use non-existent character 'ি' (2495,0x09bf) in font "Cambria"
- looking for slant=regular, weight=regular (400)
- no substitute character exists in font "Lucida Sans Unicode"

Attempt to use non-existent character 'ব' (2476,0x09ac) in font "Cambria"
- looking for slant=regular, weight=regular (400)
- no substitute character exists in font "Lucida Sans Unicode"

Attempt to use non-existent character 'ন' (2472,0x09a8) in font "Cambria"
- looking for slant=regular, weight=regular (400)
- no substitute character exists in font "Lucida Sans Unicode"
- no other missing characters will be listed for this font

 

I have specified Cambria as the default font for our PDFs but I can't figure out where or how to specify substitute fonts. We have published articles with a wide variety of non-Latin scripts (e.g., Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ethiopic, Coptic, etc.). Ideally I would like any non-Latin script to display in our PDFs with minimal intervention on our part. Can anyone offer any suggestions?

 

Thanks!

Rick Schoen (he/him/his)

Manager, Editing and Application Servers, Electronic Publishing
Journals Division
The University of Chicago Press

 

1 reply

G
GarethOakes16-Pearl
16-Pearl
December 15, 2022

FOSI! those were the good old days, this method of publishing isn't support by PTC any more.

Having said that, I seem to remember you had to create your own font mappings for situations like this. Have a look at wfontsub.cf and tfontsub.cf in the "lib" folder of Arbortext. You're meant to copy those files into your own custom\lib folder and update accordingly.

Final thought: I noticed that your errors are relating to Bengali characters. These characters are available in Arial Unicode MS. By default, Arbortext will use Arial Unicode MS as a fallback font for substitution of missing glyphs. Perhaps Arial Unicode MS isn't installed? Try installing Arial Unicode MS and see if that makes the errors go away. That's easier than maintaining custom font configuration files.

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